Svetlana comes from the Slavic svet, meaning "light" or "world." The name was popularised in Russia in the 19th century after Vasily Zhukovsky's 1813 ballad Svetlana.
Svetlana is widely used across the Slavic world. Svetlana Alexievich (born 1948), the Belarusian author, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.
Svetlana reduces to three — the number of luminous Slavic identity.